HypertextHypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...
is text displayed on a
computerA computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
or other electronic device with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence.
Early precursors to hypertext
Recorders of information have long looked for ways to categorize and compile it. Early on, experiments existed with various methods for arranging layers of
annotationAn annotation is a note that is made while reading any form of text. This may be as simple as underlining or highlighting passages.Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument...
s around a document. The most famous example of this is the
TalmudThe Talmud is a central text of mainstream Judaism. It takes the form of a record of rabbinic discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history....
. Other reference works (for example dictionaries, encyclopedias) also developed a precursor to hypertext: the setting of certain words in small capital letters, indicating that an entry existed for that term within the same reference work. Sometimes the term would be preceded by an
indexThe symbol is a punctuation mark, called an index, manicule or fist. Though rare today, this symbol was in common use between the 12th and 18th centuries in the margins of books, and was formerly included in lists of standard punctuation marks...
,
☞like this, or an
arrowAn arrow is a graphical symbol such as → or ←, used to point or indicate direction, being in its simplest form a line segment with a triangle affixed to one end, and in more complex forms a representation of an actual arrow...
,
➧like this.
Janet MurrayJanet Murray is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is the director of graduate studies in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture. Before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999, she was a Senior Research Scientist in the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives...
has referenced
Jorge Luis BorgesJorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
' "
The Garden of Forking Paths"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan , which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones in 1944...
" as a precursor to the hypertext novel and aesthetic.
"The concept Borges described in 'The Garden of Forking Paths'—in several layers of the story, but most directly in the combination book and maze of Ts'ui Pen—is that of a novel that can be read in multiple ways, a hypertext novel. Borges described this in 1941, prior to the invention (or at least the public disclosure) of the electromagnetic digital computer. Borges also mentions how hypertext has similarities to a labyrinth in which each link brings the navigator to a set of new links, in an ever expanding maze. Not only did he invent the hypertext novel—Borges went on to describe a theory of the universe based upon the structure of such a novel." -
Wardrip-FruinNoah Wardrip-Fruin is Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is an advisor for the Expressive Intelligence Studio. He is an alumnus of the Literary Arts MFA program and Special Graduate Study PhD program at Brown University...
and
MontfortNick Montfort is an associate professor of digital media at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies. He is also a poet, computer scientist, and author of interactive fiction. Montfort has collaborated on the blog Grand Text Auto, the sticker novel Implementation, and the contemporary...
Umberto EcoUmberto Eco Knight Grand Cross is an Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose , an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory...
has also referenced
Finnegans WakeFinnegans Wake is a novel by Irish author James Joyce, significant for its experimental style and resulting reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language. Written in Paris over a period of seventeen years, and published in 1939, two years before the author's...
in the same way .
Later, several scholars entered the scene who believed that humanity was drowning in information, causing foolish decisions and duplicating efforts among scientists. These scholars proposed or developed proto-hypertext systems predating electronic computer technology. For example, in the early 20th century, two visionaries attacked the cross-referencing problem through proposals based on labor-intensive,
brute forceIn computer science, brute-force search or exhaustive search, also known as generate and test, is a trivial but very general problem-solving technique that consists of systematically enumerating all possible candidates for the solution and checking whether each candidate satisfies the problem's...
methods.
Paul OtletPaul Marie Ghislain Otlet was an author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent...
proposed a proto-hypertext concept based on his monographic principle, in which all documents would be decomposed down to unique phrases stored on
index cardAn index card consists of heavy paper stock cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. It was invented by Carl Linnaeus, around 1760....
s. In the 1930s, H.G. Wells proposed the creation of a
World BrainWorld Brain is a collection of essays and addresses the English science fiction pioneer, social reformer, evolutionary biologist and historian H. G. Wells written during the period 1936-38...
.
Michael BucklandMichael Keeble Buckland is an Emeritus Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative....
summarized the very advanced pre-World War II development of microfilm based on rapid retrieval devices, specifically the microfilm based workstation proposed by Leonard Townsend in 1938 and the microfilm and photoelectronic based selector, patented by
Emanuel GoldbergEmanuel Goldberg was born in Moscow and moved first to Germany and later to Israel...
in 1931. Buckland concluded: "The pre-war information retrieval specialists of continental Europe, the 'documentalists,' largely disregarded by post-war information retrieval specialists, had ideas that were considerably more advanced than is now generally realized." But, like the manual index card model, these microfilm devices provided rapid retrieval based on pre-coded indices and classification schemes published as part of the microfilm record without including the link model which distinguishes the modern concept of hypertext from content or category based
information retrievalInformation retrieval is the area of study concerned with searching for documents, for information within documents, and for metadata about documents, as well as that of searching structured storage, relational databases, and the World Wide Web...
.
The Memex
All major histories of what we now call hypertext start in 1945, when
Vannevar BushVannevar Bush was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, the founding of Raytheon, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm viewer...
wrote an article in
The Atlantic MonthlyThe Atlantic is an American magazine founded in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1857. It was created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine. It quickly achieved a national reputation, which it held for more than a century. It was important for recognizing and publishing new writers and poets,...
called "
As We May ThinkAs We May Think is an essay by Vannevar Bush, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in July 1945, and republished again as an abridged version in September 1945 — before and after the U.S. nuclear attacks on Japan...
", about a futuristic device he called a
MemexThe memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the hypothetical proto-hypertext system he described in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think...
. He described the device as an electromechanical desk linked to an extensive archive of microfilms, able to display books, writings, or any document from a library. The Memex would also be able to create 'trails' of linked and branching sets of pages, combining pages from the published microfilm library with personal annotations or additions captured on a microfilm recorder. Bush's vision was based on extensions of 1945 technology - microfilm recording and retrieval in this case. However, the modern story of hypertext starts with the Memex because "As We May Think" directly influenced and inspired the two American men generally credited with the invention of hypertext,
Ted NelsonTheodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
and
Douglas EngelbartDouglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
.
The invention of hypertext
Starting in 1963,
Ted NelsonTheodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...
developed a model for creating and using linked content he called "hypertext" and "hypermedia" (first published reference 1965). He later worked with
Andries van DamAndries "Andy" van Dam is a Dutch-born American professor of computer science and former Vice-President for Research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hypertext system, HES in the late 1960s. He co-authored Computer Graphics:...
to develop the
Hypertext Editing SystemThe Hypertext Editing System, or HES, was an early hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967 by Andries van Dam, Ted Nelson, and several Brown students. HES was a pioneering hypertext system that organized data into two main types: links and branching text...
in 1967 at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
.
Douglas EngelbartDouglas Carl Engelbart is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human-computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to GUIs...
independently began working on his
NLSNLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...
system in 1962 at Stanford Research Institute, although delays in obtaining funding, personnel, and equipment meant that its key features were not completed until 1968. In December of that year, Engelbart demonstrated a hypertext interface to the public for the first time, in what has come to be known as "
The Mother of All DemosThe Mother of All Demos is a name given to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace...
"
Funding for NLS slowed after 1974. Influential work in the following decade included
NoteCardsNoteCards was a hypertext personal knowledge basesystem developed at Xerox PARC by Randall Trigg, Frank Halasz and Thomas Moran in 1984. NoteCards developed after Trigg became the first to write a Ph.D. thesis on hypertext while at the University of Maryland College Park in 1983...
at
Xerox PARCPARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....
and
ZOGZOG was an early hypertext system developed at Carnegie Mellon University during the 1970s by Donald McCracken and Robert Akscyn. ZOG was first developed by Allen Newell and George Robertson to serve as the front end for AI and Cognitive Science programs brought together at CMU for a summer workshop...
at Carnegie Mellon. ZOG started in 1972 as an
artificial intelligenceArtificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
research project under the supervision of
Allen NewellAllen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...
, and pioneered the "frame" or "card" model of hypertext. ZOG was deployed in 1982 on the
U.S.S. Carl VinsonThe USS Carl Vinson is the third United States Navy Nimitz class supercarrier and is named after Carl Vinson, a Congressman from Georgia. Carl Vinson's callsign is "Gold Eagle". It played host to the first NCAA basketball game on an aircraft carrier on 11/11/11 between the University of North...
and later commercialized as Knowledge Management System. Two other influential hypertext projects from the early 1980s were
Ben ShneidermanBen Shneiderman is an American computer scientist, and professor for Computer Science at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park...
's
The Interactive Encyclopedia SystemThe Interactive Encyclopedia System, or TIES, was a hypertext system developed at the University of Maryland, College Park by Ben Shneiderman in 1983. The earliest versions of TIES ran in DOS text mode, using the cursor arrow keys for navigating through information...
(TIES) at the
University of MarylandThe University of Maryland, College Park is a top-ranked public research university located in the city of College Park in Prince George's County, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C...
(1983) and
IntermediaIntermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES and FRESS . Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier hypertext research at Brown...
at
Brown UniversityBrown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
(1984).
Early Hypertext Applications
The first hypermedia application was the
Aspen Movie MapThe Aspen Movie Map was a revolutionary hypermedia system developed at MIT by a team working with Andrew Lippman in 1978 with funding from ARPA.-Features:...
in 1977. In 1980,
Tim Berners-LeeSir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, , also known as "TimBL", is a British computer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web...
created
ENQUIREENQUIRE was an early software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web in 1989.It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.According to...
, an early hypertext database system somewhat like a
wikiA wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
. The early 1980s also saw a number of experimental hypertext and
hypermediaHypermedia is a computer-based information retrieval system that enables a user to gain or provide access to texts, audio and video recordings, photographs and computer graphics related to a particular subject.Hypermedia is a term created by Ted Nelson....
programs, many of whose features and terminology were later integrated into the Web.
GuideGuide was a hypertext system originally developed by Peter J. Brown at the University of Kent in 1982. The original Guide implementation was for Three Rivers PERQ workstations running Unix. The Guide system was also the third hypertext system to be sold commercially, after it was taken over by...
was the first significant hypertext system for
personal computerA personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s. In 1983, a hypermedia authoring tool, Tutor-Tech, designed for
Apple II computersThe Apple II series is a set of 8-bit home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer and introduced in 1977 with the original Apple II...
, was produced for educators.
In August 1987,
Apple ComputerApple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
released
HyperCardHyperCard is an application program created by Bill Atkinson for Apple Computer, Inc. that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. It combines database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also features HyperTalk, written...
for the Macintosh line at the
MacWorld conventionProduced by Boston-based IDG World Expo, Macworld | iWorld is a trade-show with conference tracks dedicated to the Apple Macintosh platform. It is held annually in the United States, usually during the second week of January...
. Its impact, combined with interest in Peter J. Brown's GUIDE (marketed by OWL and released earlier that year) and Brown University's
IntermediaIntermedia was the third notable hypertext project to emerge from Brown University, after HES and FRESS . Intermedia was started in 1985 by Norman Meyrowitz, who had been associated with earlier hypertext research at Brown...
, led to broad interest in and enthusiasm for hypertext and new media. The first ACM Hypertext
academic conferenceAn academic conference or symposium is a conference for researchers to present and discuss their work. Together with academic or scientific journals, conferences provide an important channel for exchange of information between researchers.-Overview:Conferences are usually composed of various...
took place in November 1987, in Chapel Hill NC, where many other applications, including the hypertext literature writing software
StoryspaceStoryspace was the first software program specifically developed for creating, editing, and reading hypertext fiction. It was developed in the 1980s by Jay David Bolter and Michael Joyce, who presented it to the first international meeting on Hypertext at Chapel Hill in October 1987...
were also demoed
Meanwhile Nelson, who had been working on and advocating his
XanaduProject Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...
system for over two decades, along with the commercial success of HyperCard, stirred
AutodeskAutodesk, Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on 3D design software for use in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media and entertainment industries. The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, a coauthor of the first versions of the company's...
to invest in his revolutionary ideas. The project continued at Autodesk for four years, but no product was released.
Hypertext and the World Wide Web
In the late 1980s, Berners-Lee, then a scientist at
CERNThe European Organization for Nuclear Research , known as CERN , is an international organization whose purpose is to operate the world's largest particle physics laboratory, which is situated in the northwest suburbs of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border...
, invented the
World Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
to meet the demand for simple and immediate information-sharing among physicists working at CERN and different universities or institutes all over the world.
In 1992, LynxLynx is a text-based web browser for use on cursor-addressable character cell terminals and is very configurable.-Usage:Browsing in Lynx consists of highlighting the chosen link using cursor keys, or having all links on a page numbered and entering the chosen link's number. Current versions support...
was born as an early Internet web browser. Its ability to provide hypertext links within documents that could reach into documents anywhere on the Internet began the creation of the Web on the Internet.
Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing ApplicationsThe National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...
(NCSA) at the University of IllinoisThe University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
released the first version of their Mosaic web browser to supplement the two existing web browserA web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...
s: one that ran only on NeXTSTEPNeXTSTEP was the object-oriented, multitasking operating system developed by NeXT Computer to run on its range of proprietary workstation computers, such as the NeXTcube...
and one that was only minimally user-friendlyUsability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with. A usability study may be conducted as a primary job function by a usability analyst or as a secondary job...
. Because it could display and link graphics as well as text, Mosaic quickly became the replacement for Lynx. Mosaic ran in the X Window SystemThe X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
environment, which was then popular in the research community, and offered usable window-based interactions. It allowed images as well as text to anchor hypertext links. It also incorporated other protocols intended to coordinate information across the Internet, such as Gopher.
After the release of web browsers for both the PCIBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
and MacintoshThe Macintosh , or Mac, is a series of several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a...
environments, traffic on the World Wide Web quickly exploded from only 500 known web servers in 1993 to over 10,000 in 1994. Thus, all earlier hypertext systems were overshadowed by the success of the Web, even though it originally lacked many features of those earlier systems, such as an easy way to edit what you were reading, typed linkA typed link in a hypertext system is a link to another document or part of a document that includes information about the character of the link...
s, backlinkBacklinks, also known as incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, and inward links, are incoming links to a website or web page...
s, transclusionIn computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...
, and source trackingSource tracking pertains to the ability of some hypertext systems to rigorously track the exact source of every document or partial document included in the system; that is, they remember who entered the information, when it was entered, when it was updated and by whom, and so on...
.
In 1995, Ward CunninghamHoward G. "Ward" Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki. A pioneer in both design patterns and Extreme Programming, he started programming the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham , on...
made the first wikiA wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
available, making the Web more hypertextual by adding easy editing, and (within a single wiki) backlinks and limited source tracking. It also added the innovation of making it possible to link to pages that did not yet exist. Wiki developers continue to implement novel features as well as those developed or imagined in the early explorations of hypertext but not included in the original web.
The Firefox Add-On HyperwordsHyperwords was a term for interactive text. Whereas hyper-links have the specific meaning of words which are linked to specific destinations, hyperwords refers to all interactive words where the idea is that the reader can issue commands on the text...
which has been developed in cooperation with Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson gives Web surfers the ability to issue many commands on any text on the web, not only pre-written links - a return to what users could do 40 years earlier with Doug Engelbart's NLSNLS, or the "oN-Line System", was a revolutionary computer collaboration system designed by Douglas Engelbart and implemented by researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute during the 1960s...
.
External links
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GFDL.
